8 questions to ask before you design your website

When clients or friends tell me they plan to design a new website, I get curious and excited. What colors are they going to go with? What are their SEO goals? What layout are they using?

Creating a personal or business website requires serious thought and attention. There’s a lot more to it than deciding what font you plan to use. To help people who are starting a business and are looking to build a public face of a new organization or those looking to redesign be a bit less overwhelmed, here are some crucial questions they can ask themselves before, and while, creating the new website design.

1. What is the purpose of your website?

It seems obvious, but knowing the true purpose of your website will determine everything that it does and how it looks. Make sure you lay out clear objectives and goals for your website before you start on the design.

2. What will your domain name be?

Your website title should be easy to remember. Also make sure you know which domain will be appropriate (.net, .com, etc.).

3. What technology will you use for your website design?

Find a platform you’re familiar with and that is easy to use. (I recommend WordPress and/or HTML5.) If you understand how to do the basic coding, then you can make minor edits without the help of a website designer.

4. What will your content be?

A personal website will usually have content that is more about blogging and personal tastes and interests. A business website will feature content about the business itself: An “About Us” page, a blog, contact information, and pages devoted to products and/or services. It’s essential to feature content that is SEO focused, such as vivid images, creative videos, and keyword-friendly copy.

5. Who is your audience?

Every website design is a little different, and you can always tell those who know their audience well and those who don’t. Website designers who understand their audience use appropriate colors, targeted SEO (keywords, images and videos perfect for that audience), and a clean, uncluttered layout. Make sure it’s immediately clear whom you’re trying to reach when your website pops up.

6. Is your website viewable in all browsers?

Your website should not become distorted depending on the type of browser someone is using. Be sure to test your new website on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

7. What social media channels will you promote?

Linking to your social media accounts will not only boost website traffic, it will also give you major SEO points.

8. How will you track your website traffic?

You can’t increase SEO if you’re not clear about where you have to make changes. Try using Google Analytics to see where you can improve and where you’re doing well. These are just a handful of the many questions and decisions that go into building a website, whether it’s for personal or business purposes. What other questions do you think are important?

By Paige McDaniel (For PRDaily.com)

Click for Original Article

http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/16670.aspx


About us:
L&B Consultation: is a full service Multimedia Marketing & Consulting
company focusing on publicity, radio promotion,
brand identification, brand management

Check out www.LbConsultation.com
Follow us on Twitter @LBConsultation

Facebook Is Putting The Focus Back On Direct Response And FBX-Powered Ads

Facebook has focused a lot of its paid ad products on branding — ads that tout a business and build positive feelings about the brand. Search, meanwhile, has always been the primary digital format for direct response ads — ads designed to get customers to take an immediate action based on what they've already shown interest in.

But now Facebook is going after the search space pretty aggressively, with a new presentation for ad partners emphasizing Facebook's strong role as a direct response ad format.

That means Facebook Exchange (FBX) is about to get a lot more attention. It's Facebook's proprietary real-time bidding exchange and it marries Facebook user data with data from third-party platforms that track user web browsing behavior. FBX then uses these two parameters to serve hypertargeted ads in the desktop News Feed and right-rail. 

Recently, BI Intelligence took an in-depth look at FBX to understand how the Exchange works, which players are partners, and how the ads it serves perform. We also put FBX in context in terms of its size and performance.

The real-time aspect of FBX is crucial. It's impossible to target a user who is interested in living room furniture with personalized ads when they open their Facebook page unless he or she can be identified and served a relevant ad in milliseconds.

Here are some of the key details from our report on FBX: 

FBX is becoming a huge player in the real-time bidding space: Millions of ads are sold and purchased on FBX every second with the help of demand-side platforms that plug advertisers into FBX, and billions of impressions are served every day. Facebook already accounts for about half of the retargeted ad clicks on the Web. The real-time aspect of FBX is crucial It's impossible to target a user who is interested in living room furniture with personalized ads when they open their Facebook page unless he or she can be identified and served a relevant ad in milliseconds.FBX fills a certain niche, a very specific marketing objective known as "demand fulfillment," nudging shoppers to complete a purchase they've already shown interest in.The platform was fast out of the gate: FBX produced stellar early results for advertisers, both in terms of cost and performance. Eventually, the price and performance bar will be set higher. That's already starting to happen for better-performing News Feed placements.Despite FBX's huge weight in the retargeting space, it still constitutes a small share of overall Facebook revenues.FBX is not yet available on mobile, though this may be coming soon. Additionally, Sponsored Story social-native ads, which are at the heart of Facebook's ad ecosystem, aren't accessible via FBX. As Facebook makes direct response more of a priority, however, this could begin to change.

By Cooper Smith (Business Insider)

CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-putting-the-focus-back-on-direct-response-and-fbx-powered-ads-2014-5

About us:
L&B Consultation: is a full service Multimedia Marketing & Consulting
company focusing on publicity, radio promotion,
brand identification, brand management

Check out www.LbConsultation.com
Follow us on Twitter @LBConsultation